


Island Hopping

by orphan_account



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: A whole lot of 'What-if?', Alternate Realities, Angst and Humor, Attempted Murder, Civil War, F/M, M/M, Mental Institutions, This is a Steve/Tony fic, but there will be other pairings both seen and alluded to, zombies!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-04
Updated: 2013-03-16
Packaged: 2017-11-23 15:59:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/623939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re closer in age in this reality -- something that Tony secretly adores -- and you can see it written in the lines on Steve’s face. </p><p>Prompt: A mishap sends Movie!Tony across the reality spectrum to experience other versions of his life. It makes him realize all that he’s lost and all that he stands to gain with the Avengers. However, the longer he stays in a reality the more he is imbued with the memories of the Tony Stark of that reality. The experience starts to take a toll mentally and physically.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. (A Realm) Of Infinite Possibility

Stark Tower has a different floor layout in this reality.

Tony had been admiring the New York skyline - he noted his private suite faced Brooklyn, not Manhattan - when Steve had come up from behind; wrapping his arms around Tony’s chest and burying his face in crook of Tony’s shoulder.

“I hate Skrulls.” Came Steve’s muffled voice. “Skrulls and Nazis.”

“God forbid Nazi Skrulls.” Tony muttered softly, enjoying the feel of Steve wrapped around him.

“Or Skrull Nazis.” Steve agreed, chest rumbling with quiet laughter. “Could you imagine?”

This is Tony’s favorite reality so far. He’s still Iron Man, he still has an arc reactor pitted in his chest, but Steve Rogers defrosted in the 90s; and the two decades of adjustment have served him well.

Steve brushes his lips against Tony’s neck and tightens his hold, trying to get him as close as possible.

“How’s the new armor coming?”

Something swells in Tony’s chest, and he spins around in Steve’s embrace to face the soldier; looking up slightly because of their _negligible_ height difference. Steve smiles down, not breaking the hold, and the corners of his eyes crinkle slightly; barely there crow’s feet illustrating the significant discrepancies between Tony’s reality and this one.

They’re closer in age in this reality -- something that Tony secretly adores -- and you can see it written in the lines on Steve’s face. The serum has certainly done it’s work, though, and Steve’s youthful features have hardened into alpha-male masculinity.

“Are you feeling alright?” Steve prompts, raising a hand to cup Tony’s cheek. “You’re quiet,” He pauses, “Too quiet.” But Steve’s eyes are alight with mirth and any potential threat is gone as quickly as it had appeared.

“I love you,” Tony finds himself saying, and realizes then the gravity of his words, because he finds he actually means them. That revelation alone prompts him to say it again. “I really love you.”

Steve smiles indulgently and leans down with an ease of motion that only comes from years of practice. Tony is half flattered by the move and half irritated that he’s almost a full six inches shorter than this Steve Rogers.

“I love you, too.” Steve whispers against Tony’s lips, the vibration tickling slightly before Tony finds himself being guided into a kiss, the supersoldier’s mouth pressed firmly to his own. When they part - somewhat reluctantly, Tony notes -- Steve is smiling again, trailing his hands along Tony’s hips and looking for all the world like the man in his arms is the greatest thing he’s ever seen.

“So,” Steve starts lightly, pulling back only to move toward the bar. “I’m thinking dinner?”

Tony immediately wants to throw out the names of any number of his favorite restaurants, but he can’t quite recall what holdover there might be in this reality from his own, so he just hums in agreement and suggests “Thai?”

Steve pauses reaching for a water glass, a thoughtful look crossing his face.

“Something light. I was thinking sex after.”

If Tony were a lesser man he would have been unable to formulate a reply; but he’s not a lesser man, he’s Tony Stark.

“Or,” Tony proposes, sauntering up to where Steve is leaning against the stone countertop and angling into his personal space. “We could have sex now and order in.”

Tony is not expecting Steve to reach down and massage Tony’s dick through his pants.

“Alright. But we learned our lesson last time,” Steve says throatily, fingers continuing to stroke Tony’s growing erection. 

“Two orders of wontons. I’m not sharing.”

Oh, yes. This is Tony’s favorite.

 

* * *

 

The sex is weird. There isn’t a better word; or at least not one Tony can identify at this juncture. Steve is achingly attractive, and Tony hasn’t done the horizontal tango in at least the space-time continuum’s equivalent of several months, but something is off.

It just might be the bizarrely loud rumbling coming from Steve’s stomach as he pistons into Tony from behind.

“I knew I should have eaten before this,” He grunts out, words breathy and tight, and Tony is so damn close when it happens again, a dull roar over the slap of flesh that causes Steve to shake with laughter.

“I can’t,” he huffs out. “I can’t do this, I have to eat something,” Tony can already feel Steve softening inside inside of him and he whines.

“No, I’m so close, Steve, no,”

Steve laughs again, the sound clipped, and pulls out slowly amid Tony’s protests, only to flip Tony onto his back and descend on his still hard cock; licking and sucking with a superb amount of determination.

“Jesus, Steve,”

It doesn’t take long at all before Tony’s spilling into Steve’s mouth -- the three fingers Steve pushes into him put him over the edge -- and Steve swallows like a pro.

“Still hungry.” Steve says lightly, trailing a hand across Tony’s softening member only to scrape the overly sensitive tip with a blunt nail, like an asshole. 

Tony jerks away and rolls right off the bed. 

“We’ll get back to this later?” Steve calls playfully from across the bed. Tony can only groan and fumble for his pants.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, when Tony is immersed in a real-time reality, he’ll have flashes of memories that he can only assume belong to his displaced counterparts. Sometimes, if he isn’t on guard, he’ll think these memories are his own. At least until something presents that is different enough to shake him out of the regression. 

This, unfortunately, is one of those times. And Tony can’t shake out of it.

“You understand why I can’t have a supersoldier running around, Tony. My business partners, my clients, they see you stumping around with Captain America and they want me to provide an unobtainable product, a live specimen. I don’t work in human trafficking, Tony, not yet. ”

Tony can’t move, stuck in a body that’s not his. He can barely breathe, and Stane keeps talking, even as he moves toward the stairs and the lab.

“Pepper should have called your precious Steve by now, so let’s just see how this plays out, shall we?”

 

* * *

 

Steve comes through the door carefully, scouting, ever the soldier; Obidiah has never been a potential threat, at least before this moment, and Tony knows the man is woefully caught off guard. Steve catches a glimpse of Tony and likely the gaping black hole in his sternum, before red explodes across his abdomen and his knees buckle, taking him to the ground hard.

“So happy you could make it, Steve.”

It takes two seconds too long for Tony to realize Steve’s been shot.

“The finest the U.S. Army has to offer and all it took to take you down was a .22 and the element of surprise. Take note, Tony. This is why you are the future,” Obidiah gestures between them with the hand still grasping the arc reactor. “Or were, rather. Enjoy your final moments together.”

Tony knows he won’t die -- can’t die -- but it doesn’t make this easier. Reliving the bleakest moment of his life and simultaneously watching the man he loves suffer. Tony knows the end of this story: they both live, Stane dies, Tony Stark is Iron Man. What hurts now is knowing that Tony’s counterpart experienced this, and saw death coming here as surely as Tony saw his own the first time around.

Obidiah fires another round, this one catching Steve in the chest, sending him onto his back, and Tony can see the way Obie’s finger twitches on the trigger, like he’s itching to keep going, to _make sure_ Steve won’t get up again. 

Tony has a sick realization that Stane _wants_ Tony to watch Steve die, as slowly and as painfully as possible, and God, had Obie really hated him that much?

After Stane moves out of sight, and Tony isn’t sure how much time passes. Between the wet sucking sound coming from Steve as he tries to breathe through a punctured lung and Tony’s own barely-there whimpers, he can’t tell. 

He starts counting. 

He makes it to forty and Steve stops making any noise at all. By fifty he can feel something wet on his cheeks. 

This isn’t like before. Tony doesn’t want to move, to go after the spare reactor. If Steve’s dead there’s no point in surviving this; he could seek vengeance, but in the end there would be nothing left.

By six hundred and eighty-seven he can feel the muscles in his chest seizing, trying to compensate for the searing pain that Tony has come to associate with being one of the ‘walking dead’.  At six-hundred and ninety-nine Tony can feel the black creeping into his vision, and as he falls unconscious he knows he won’t be waking up again.

Except he does wake up, rather violently, to a bloodied Steve clicking an outdated arc reactor into his chest. 

“Tony,” 

“S-Steve, your chest-”

Steve looks down at his shirt, the white cotton stained a rusty-brown from the wounds that should have killed him.

“Serum.” He says quickly, brushing off Tony’s concern to help lift his still sluggish body from the couch.

‘Serum’ is not an acceptable answer. Tony’s seen Steve’s healing factor at work; bruises can fade in minutes, not gunshot wounds - 

And then he’s back in his own head, and he’s watching this scene unfold, no longer participating.

He wants to be sick. Realizing he’s forgotten himself in someone else’s memory _again;_ it’s physically jarring and only serves to remind Tony of the fact that he _can’t get home._


	2. Asylum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He knows that Obadiah put him here, however many years ago, and he knows he’s not leaving of his own volition.

He falls asleep on a down mattress, wrapped in Captain America’s arms and wakes to cold air and blinding white light.

The world has shifted again and he already dislikes whatever reality this happens to be. It doesn’t take long for his counterpart’s emotions to overlap his own, and the terror hits much harder than expected.

His mind screams at him to fight and to wrestle against his restraints. To break the orderly’s nose and find an exit without guards or a window not reinforced with rebar.

His body won’t cooperate. His head lolls to the side when he tries to look up, muscles atrophied or just unwilling to respond to mental stimuli. 

At least he can still walk.

He thinks he can still walk.

They call him Tony, in that placating voice parents use on disobedient children. His meals come with a cocktail of pills and he understands why they all talk like that. 

There is no Iron Man here. If there are other heroes, he doesn’t know and he cannot ask. 

His hands shake too badly to write, not that they’ll give him anything with a point.

_Don’t take the pills. Don’t take the pills. Don’t take the pills._

He opens his mouth obediently because this isn’t his life and and everything goes fuzzy.

 

* * *

 

He wakes in the same twin bed, wrapped in the same thin white sheets, inhaling the same alcohol-tainted air, but the medications have worn off and his mind is blissfully clear for the first time since he’s arrived in the body of what he can only assume is an institutionalized version of himself.

He doesn’t need to wait long for sporadic memories to confirm that truth.

He knows he shouldn’t be here, that the pills make everything slow on purpose to keep him from causing trouble.

He knows that Obadiah put him here, however many years ago, and he knows he’s not leaving of his own volition.

He gets brief flashes of memory, horribly disjointed and contextually meaningless. This Stark is a shell. Nothing notable left of a once brilliant mind and Tony mourns the man he might have been, because there is no Pepper here. No JARVIS, no Rhodey, no Bruce.

He is completely and utterly alone in a facility that exists to keep people like him away from the public.

Time can’t pass quickly enough. He needs to get out of this world before he absorbs anymore of the man-made sickness that has consumed his counterpart.

 

* * *

 

It takes less than a day before he starts hallucinating and picking at his skin. 

During brief moments of lucidity, Tony’s mind supplies dozens of potential pharmaceutical drugs that could be causing his medically-induced dementia, but he loses the ability to rationalize what the drugs even do, let alone their respective side-effects.

_Ziprasidone._

_Lurasidone._

_Asenapine._

He has no idea what has or has not been developed, or even what year it is, but he knows enough to recognize that forced chemical treatment can destroy healthy brain function; and god only knows how long he’s been drugged.

In three days, Tony can barely remember his own name. He kicks at nurses and screams himself hoarse when the lights go out after curfew.

It’s almost two weeks before he’s zapped into another existence, and he’s never been so grateful for his high cognitive function.

The sick feeling that comes with a loss of motor function remains, however; a remnant of the Anthony Stark that never was.

For the first time during the course of this cruel misadventure, he wonders what might happen if he were to die while inhabiting another Stark’s body.

 


	3. Biological Imperative

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trading twenty minutes in a chaotic board room for thirty years of another man’s emotional neglect and substance abuse is a harrowing experience at best, and he’s not sure how much longer he can do it, living these lives that aren’t his.

 

Tony finds a reality where he’s an unburdened billionaire and slips away in the night to an island he’d contemplated purchasing himself a decade ago back home. 

The comfort of sun and sea, of the natural world among a situation so unnatural is something he doesn’t know he needs until he feels the cool ocean breeze and warm sunlight on his face. 

He spends three weeks on the beach getting shit-faced, and he doesn’t see another human being the entire time. The break is more than welcome after the hospital reality, and he uses the time to catalogue what he’s learned so far through the increasingly hellish misadventure that has become his life. 

Knowing he can’t take anything physical with him, he maps out the spectrum, at least what he knows of it, in his mind. 

His home world, complete with an alien decimated New York, his slim-rostered Avengers and a decidedly heterosexual Steve Rogers, becomes Reality Zero. After that it’s just a matter of cataloging the various discrepancies between worlds.

His current reality, for example, has yielded no JARVIS, no SHIELD, and to the best of his knowledge no superheroes. To be fair he hadn’t gone exploring, but such a feat would prove difficult anyway without the benefit of a suit of armor. 

The reality where he’d been institutionalized, the seventeenth he’d ‘visited’: obviously no Iron Man there. Enough traumatic experiences to last him a lifetime, but no Iron Man. Barely a Tony Stark, even.

Then the countless half-lives he’d experienced that barely allowed him time to find his bearings. Dozens of faces, people he’d never met, women he’d slept with, several _men_ he’d slept with, and in more than one reality individuals he’d _killed._ But there were discrepancies between the time spent in these worlds and the memories he’d garnered in return.

He drags a hand through the damp sand surrounding his lounge chair, fingers tracing patterns that, blissfully, come from a place of unconsciousness and hold no deep mathematical meaning.

He wonders how long it will take him to lose his mind. The full implications of each jump don’t hit him often until two or three lives down the road. 

Trading twenty minutes in a chaotic board room for thirty years of another man’s emotional neglect and substance abuse is harrowing at best, and he’s not sure how much longer he can do it, living these lives that aren’t his.

It’s difficult for him to even remember which Stark he is sometimes, his own life colored with those of countless others. 

So he makes notes.

_My name is Anthony Edward Stark._

He thinks of the reality where Rogers was Steve, and how for a brief moment Tony knew what it was to love someone wholly and unconditionally. Nothing like anything he’d experienced prior or since. He thinks of his current youthful features and deceptively smooth chest.

_Captain America is two decades my junior. There is a miniaturized ARC Reactor buried in my chest where a good chunk of sternum should be._

Tony thinks of Stark Tower a dozen times over. Of his childhood home, the manor on Fifth Avenue. Of the countless worlds where he shares his residences -- wherever they might be -- with costumed heroes and vigilantes. With gods and villains. Friends and lovers.

_I live in Malibu, California. Alone. With an artificial intelligence and several useless robots._

The surf catches his hand and the cold shocks him slightly.

_Obadiah Stane is dead. He has no children._

Tony breathes through the aborted rush of adrenaline and wills himself to calm.

_My reality has no mutants._

Something churns in his gut at the thought of all the worlds that had subjugated countless numbers of innocent people guilty of nothing more than a biological imperative. 

What he wouldn’t give to manipulate magnetic fields, to control metal with a thought or to communicate with machines on an intuitive level. Hell, even to fly without the suit would be a gift too fantastic to refuse.

He remembers the armor, and which components belong to his own innovation and not to the mind of a Stark ten years younger who’s married to an Asgardian goddess.

_My name is Tony Stark, and I am Iron Man._

There’s a buzzing in his fingertips, and he exhales, letting his eyes slip shut as he tips his face toward the warmth of the Caribbean sun. In a heartbeat the comfort disappears and sea air is replaced with the too-clean oxygen of his armor’s air filtration system. 

He opens his eyes to a table of costumed heroes looking at him expectantly. A Captain America that isn’t Steve Rogers taps his fingers in irritation. 

“Well, Stark? Where do you come down on the Skrull issue?” 

In his mind’s eye, he sees a mirror; and reflected in that mirror is a Tony Stark with green skin and pointed ears. Tony knows what body he’s inhabiting and gives a non-committal answer that causes this Captain America to narrow his gaze in suspicion.

He thinks of all the worlds where Steve is dead. Where Pepper is dead. Where Rhodey and Happy and Clint and Natasha and Bruce and Thor are rotting in the ground; and when he feels the tingle in his fingers once more he’s beyond relieved. There’s no guarantee that the next world will be better, however, but at least he knows he’s avoiding death in this one.

He adds a new fact to the list of things that remind him he’s him.

_My name is Tony Stark, and I am afraid._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this has been a bit sporadic, but thank you for sticking with me. I greatly appreciate your feedback, and hopefully I'll be able to get another chapter up soon!


	4. An (Almost) Civil War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “They were going to come down hard and come down fast until there was nothing left to question. This fucker,” Tony motions to himself angrily. “Thought you’d come around if given the chance to talk it out. But some people decided it would be better to start a goddamn war instead.”

 

“I’m not your Tony Stark.”

They put him in a SHIELD holding cell.

 

* * *

 

“There’s been a mistake, I’m not him-”

They interrogate him for twenty-seven hours.

 

* * *

 

“You don’t understand,”

Then there is a prison.

 

* * *

 

“This,”

A hospital.

 

* * *

 

“Isn’t,”

A boardroom.

 

* * *

 

“My,”

An alien world.

 

* * *

 

“Life!”

A bedroom.

 

* * *

 

He stands before a Congressional Committee chaired by Senator Hammer of New Jersey.

“Who are you?” 

He gives the only answer he can.

“I don’t know.”

 

* * *

 

He jumps into the middle of an argument over some useless piece of legislation and lets his body go limp, adjusting to the eerie presence of Extremis in his system once more. Even the comfort of being in Stark Tower again is deadened by the bone-deep exhaustion of simply existing. A news feed buzzes in the back of his mind, the word _Stamford_ playing over and over again. And so much _guilt_.

It's a wonder this Stark can still function.

The dull roar of the argument dissipates and Tony meets this Steve Rogers’ incensed expression wearily. 

He can feel a curl of desire roll through him at the sight of yet another age-appropriate Captain America, and he allows himself a moment to wonder what wire were crossed in his own universe to result in such an atypical sample of superheroes as the Avengers Initiative.

“Stark?” Someone asks from behind, and he turns to meet a slender figure outfitted with what looks like one of his suits if someone had taken the time to bolt multi-jointed titanium-alloy appendages to it.

 _Spider-Man_ , the hive mind supplies. _Iron-Spider._

“ _Really? Iron-Spider?_ ” 

It takes him a second to realize he’s spoken aloud.

“Tony?” Steve questions, anger momentarily forgotten. 

Oh, right, this must be Registration. He's skirted a few realities dealing with this already.

That beautiful bundle of misinformation and suffering disguised as preventative legislation. Himself and Rogers on opposite sides of the argument, battling it out physically to prove moral superiority. A clusterfuck of incomprehensible proportions that crescendoing into an alien invasion that put Loki’s own coming out party to shame.

Fabulous. Just what he needed to deal with today.

“You people don’t get it, do you?” He drawls, too drained to muster any emotion that might be construed as fear; and two dozen confused superheroes turn to him, questioning.

“Tony, are you drunk?” One Janet Van Dyne hisses at him from beside the kid dressed like an arachnid, and Tony does a double take, because in this reality his former one-night stand is Tinkerbell.

No, wait, _Wasp_. 

“What is with you people and bugs? Is there an ‘Ant-Man’ somewhere around here too?”

Someone clears their throat loudly.

“Oh, you better be kidding. Mother of god.”

All right, so he has no filter in this reality. Well, too late to go back now. Honesty has only failed him every time he’s tried it, maybe this time he’ll get lucky and jump before they crack open his ribcage and see what’s inside.

“Stark,” 

There’s the good Captain again, always concerned for his fellow man. Tony wonders if they’re fucking in this reality too. 

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

No love lost there. Shame. 

“Is this about the amendment? Because you should know you’re the one in the right. Socially, morally, politically, all that jazz. I agree with you five-hundred thousand percent. Super-powered individuals shouldn’t be beholden to a singular authority, it’s dangerous and allows for corruption, blah blah blah. So perk up, Buttercup, you win. But, really, I win and you die and everything is terrible.”

The words come unbidden, spoken from a mind much more conscious than his own, and for a nano-second Tony is proud to be the facilitator of this discussion, even if the argument is not of his own design. Steve looks flustered and a wave of protest rises from whatever poor saps decided to side with this Tony Stark. 

“Oh, shut up, all of you. Do you think anyone really wins here? No matter the outcome?”

“Why the sudden change of heart?” Steve asks, tone cautious and ultimately disbelieving.

“There is no change of heart. He knew about the bill before anyone else, and it was in place before Stamford was ever a blip in the public eye. They were going to come down hard and come down fast until there was nothing left to question. This fucker,” Tony motions to himself angrily. “Thought you’d come around if given the chance to talk it out. But some people decided it would be better to start a goddamn war instead.”

The room is disturbingly silent. Shit. 

“What the hell, Stark? What’s wrong with you?”

Think. He has to think.

It hits him so acutely that he wonders how he missed it before now.

“Xavier.” Blank stares.

“I need to speak with Charles Xavier. Or Emma Frost. Jean Grey? Stephen Strange?”

A room full of superhumans, and no mutants.

“Any telepaths here? Anyone at all?”

His fingers start tingling. Pins and needles. The feeling always the same no matter the physical form.

“Oh, never mind.” Tony says to the fading crowd, but he remembers something as the reality shifts around him, and before his consciousness sinks into the void he yells out,

“Spider-Woman,”

 

* * *

 

“...Is a Skrull!”

Howard stares at him curiously from across the dining room table. 

“Anthony, are you feeling alright?”

Tony rests his head in his hands and laughs into the callous-free skin of youth. 

 


End file.
